


corpus

by jamnesias



Series: Untitled Holmes/Watson series [3]
Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films)
Genre: Abuse of Metaphors, Angst, Boxing & Fisticuffs, M/M, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-31
Updated: 2013-05-31
Packaged: 2017-12-13 13:27:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/824808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jamnesias/pseuds/jamnesias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Holmes has kept up a practise – commonly derided as calculated lunacy – to memorise the order of streets and shops in all of London. Each borough. It is, after all, sprawling, austere and occasionally pig-headed in its layout. One should know it inside out.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	corpus

**Author's Note:**

> Ignore film 2; this was written before it.

Holmes has kept up a practise – commonly derided as calculated lunacy – to memorise the order of streets and shops in all of London. Each borough. It is, after all, sprawling, austere and occasionally pig-headed in its layout. One should know it inside out.

From the beginning of their acquaintance, Watson surprises Holmes with his _own_ knowledge and memory of the city. Makes him consider. It is all so easy for Holmes to remember, of course, but men with lesser gifts apply their own logic to their learning. Tricks and rhymes that they can equate to themselves.

Watson hadn’t been in London long when Holmes had met him, yet just a few months later he already appears to have slipped the knowledge of it on like another skin. Like a sylkie. How to track the colours of Whitechapel, or the length of the underground, how to get from Brompton cemetary to the new roads of Notting Hill. The finest place for study, the view by the Serpentine. All the parts of the riverbank best for dumping a body. He turns up two or three times in places that Holmes does not expect him to, and so he tests him, and--

Watson sighs, his breath warm with beer and copper. “Holmes."

Holmes blinks. Back, back from wandering rumination to the damp cellar full of barrels, underneath the sawdust covered cellar where he'd fought, underneath the pub that shouldn't be there. Back to the throb in his cheek and fists, his bare chest and feet.

Watson is looking at him, very very close up. His eyes are a little bloodshot, but still piercing, with the cloth held an inch and a half from Holmes’s nose. He is glaring a little. Somewhat rude; Holmes hasn’t actually _done_ anything.

“Watson?” He spreads his bare arms to the empty cellar. "You have stopped attending to my wounds. Wounds gained in service of your wallet. This is lacklustre care."

Watson rolls his eyes to the dusty ceiling and leans in again to grab his chin, holding him still. " _N_ o," he says, moving to catalogue Holmes’s face in the dim gaslight for a moment and then beginning once again to sponge the blood away. The hot pressure underneath the swelling on Holmes’s cheekbone from the carefully anticipated punch. Hot pressure in Holmes's stomach, thighs. "Don’t change the subject. What you are thinking? I can tell you are, you have that look where your--"

This close up, Holmes can see every kind of blue in his eyes, the one small mole in the very centre of his right cheek, the slightly finer hair in his right eyebrow than his left. When he is older, that will be shot through with grey. He can see all of this, thinking ahead and back, but Watson is talking, carrying on, so Holmes also thinks _Don't look at his mouth_.

"--and you were staring at the wall behind me, _through_ me, for a full three minutes there. I counted."

He smiles. How _tenacious_.

Watson snorts, leaning down to drop the cloth into the half full bucket next to them on the floor, which he makes a face at. Then he straightens and makes another face at Holmes. It’s one he is becoming fond of.

"Now, you don't have a head injury--"

"I do a _little_ bit."

"--and so the only explanation for you being this quiet is deducing something. _What?_ "

They are still getting to know one another. Holmes theorises that Watson might be as uncertain how to act, to be, when it is quiet between them. As uncertain as he is, perhaps. Shockingly. But Watson is smiling as he says this, soft and definitely a little drunk, his sleeves rolled up and the notes that he had won stuffed haphazardly into his waistcoat pocket. Holmes planned to pickpocket that from him before someone else did.

"Well, my dear fellow.” He links his fingers together on his lap, like a teacher. “I was considering how on God's green, glorious and grotty little Earth you remembered how to find this illustrious establishment."

“Ah.” Watson laughs, stepping backwards to sit, just a touch stiffly (one leap with excitement when Holmes had won the fight, and moments of tense, fixed attention before - his thigh will be aching) on a barrel opposite Holmes's. Almost immediately he begins to dig the heel of his hand across the deadened muscle in his leg. Of course.

Holmes props one (jittery, excited, adrenaline - _you were preening, old cock, you were showing off for him_ _and you know it_ ) leg across his other knee, presses fingers against his split cheek and looks at Watson. He wants an answer. Alas, Watson has this… _trait,_ wherein sometimes he chooses not to reply to Holmes. It’s infuriating. And wonderful.

"We only passed this abode once, at a full sprint, over three weeks ago,” he presses on. “Not to _mention_ that that was only two minutes before you got clocked in the skull with that crate of radishes."

"Don't remind me of that,” Watson scowls, looking up. “That is the most idiotic injury that I have ever received.”

"And yet you got here."

Another shrug. He is distracted by crooking and digging the knuckles of his fingers into his aching thigh. He is also showing weakness to Holmes. Trust. Invitation? "Yes."

It’s not enough information. _Maddening_. Holmes sits up straight, his back clicking. Fine, fine. Facts:

"You have never been in this alley in daylight, although you know the apothecarist next door from when you broke his nose last week, so that would explain some recognition. But you didn't ask Mrs Hudson for directions - there was no scent of her on you when you arrived, and you know that on Saturday nights she likes a weep and a nip of whiskey at precisely nine o'clock and heaven knows you don't ever interrupt _that_ lady. You only paused once on the way and that was at Denmark Street to let a carriage cut around you - I can tell by the splash marks on your shoes and yes, I would wager that there was a rather pretty woman in it, no? - and I left you no map or reminder of where to be. Also, you were knocked out by vegetables last time we were here. And yet." Holmes takes his hand off his cheek to point at Watson, who is bemusedly staring at him, surprised, impressed, eyes bright like a bird’s in the dim. " _There_ you are. Perfectly timed to bet on my inevitable victory."

Holmes could not have planned it better himself. He had planned it, of course, fooling himself that it was absent thought, absent imagining, nothing that would come to be. A test. _But for which of them?_

Watson goes to answer – but there is a thump from upstairs and they both automatically glance up. Dust and sand shifts and drifts down from the ceiling, loosened from the beams by the final fight taking place above them. A little sawdust follows. Holmes has it all over his bare feet.

"Sooo," he says, kicking said feet happily as he leans sideways, avoiding the detritus as it falls to the floor next to him.  “How did you remember where to go?"

Watson smiles at his own feet, wiping his hands off on his thighs, and begins rolling his cuffs down. "Anatomy.”

Another thump, a muffled roar from the crowd upstairs. Hold on. What? "Excuse me?"

Watson laughs, once. " _Anatomy_. There's only one way that I can remember anything now, old boy." He fiddles with his left cuff, fumbling over the button. "Years of medical and army training have ruined me. Base it on anatomy and drill it into me, and I can keep it in my mind. Otherwise I have little likelihood to retain anything. _Especially_ when I keep being blind-sided by market produce." He gives up and buttons the cuff partly with his teeth, grinning at Holmes with his chin down, eyes up. "This alley curves like a clavicle from the street," he says. "I remembered that."

Holmes. Thinks.

Medical sensibility overlaid with metaphor. Unexpected. And yet predictably apt.

And yet _perfect_.

Perfect.

He felt thrown, blown over. Watson gets up, unaware of what he’s done, and starts pottering around, clearing up the fabric he’s used, chucking the bucket of water out into a corner, humming in distaste - and Holmes sits, brain spinning. He knew anatomy as well. He could use this. It might work better than his own method. It would help him to understand his friend, too. It was so brilliantly _brutal,_ and beautiful.

How he might test the reflex and resistance of doors, railings, or fencing. How he could remember the oldest roads and tunnels like the archaic names of crucial bones and supports. The spine, the shins, the humerus. What a moment, what an example of that singular ability Watson seems to have, to surprise him. So logical and predictable, these elements that fit his character completely and yet are utterly new. Unique. So mundane, so bright.

It’s a disaster, of course. All of his perfect, painstakingly detailed maps – ruined. Spontaneous creation. Death and rebirth. He wondered if Watson was familiar with the grouping of uneven cobbles halfway down the south bank like old scars. What he thought when he noticed the newest buildings and the run down pits, the poverty like a badly re-set elbow, the homeless a scab that the city can’t stop picking at.  He is staring at something, nothing. His thoughts spin and arc around him like planets.

Watson picks his hat off the floor, finds Holmes's shirt, and waves it vaguely at him. “If your brain isn’t too busy, would you like to go home?”

He is seeing London’s lanes and alleys as ankles, shoulders. Crossroads like the set of hips. The wealthy streets with trees flowering jewellery and adornments on London’s crown. Hushed-up brothels are tucked behind-the-knees; sewers and tunnels shuttle the waste and the filth and the underground trades like the veins and capillaries. Life blood. Where to meet the right people; where to meet the  _wrong_  people.

He blinks again at Watson, and laughs until his voice runs out. He dresses again, shucks on his shoes, and links arms with Watson on the way home, playing on the beer he’s had to cover the fact that his hands are shaking. His legs.

Later, the moment is just another recollection, another memory of a moment with Watson, just as now his own impression of Watson’s impressions lay up against his own. His own maps, affected. His own structure, his own mind. An adaption to his very soul. And so it is, this manner in which he cannot escape Watson. They have muddied together like water and wine. These thoughts like a blueprint behind his own. Memory and simile are all so irrevocably tangled up with all that his senses tell him. It is  _his_  city, or it was his first; it should be  _his_  story-tricks and memories to recall names – only now he always sees London’s body, as he sees Watson’s body, as he so desperately aware of all of the lines of it, the size, and of the shape of his own nearby. As if it has always been this way. Feeling all at once bigger, and smaller. How they are infinite.

How he realises that he knows nothing about _this_ , really.

Nothing at all.


End file.
